Tag: SEXOFFENDERS

North Carolina state law prohibits registered sex offenders from using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, but two lawyers believe that the restriction is unconstitutional. Attorney Glenn Gerding, who is representing convicted sex offender Christian Martin Johnson, argues that the law is too broad, and would prevent his client from using sites like Google or Amazon, since both ...

When 17-year-old Anna Jiang found herself being harassed by a sex offender on a New York subway, she didn't scream for help, or attempt to fight him off with her purse. She reached for her cell phone. As New American Media reports, the Brooklyn Tech high school student somehow found the presence of mind to use her cell phone camera to take a picture of the creep, who was reportedly masturbating ...

A major data system used to keep track of sex offenders shut down Tuesday morning, after unexpectedly reaching its storage limit. The blackout, which lasted about 12 hours, prevented law enforcement authorities in 49 states from keeping track of some 16,000 sex offenders, parolees and other marked citizens. Although tracking devices continued to record movements of known offenders, authorities at ...

Last week, police in Pennsylvania arrested a 27-year-old man on charges of statutory rape, after he had inexplicably professed his love for a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. A child welfare agency in Delaware County initially alerted law enforcement authorities after the suspect, Robert Nickson, Jr., announced on Facebook that he was "in love" with and "engaged" to his unnamed teenage paramour. ...

Where do you go if you want to report a flasher in a flash? Under most circumstances, you'd probably call the police. Under more pressing circumstances, though, you might want to take a page from Nay Khun's book, and go straight to Twitter. Khun, you see, was riding Boston's underground transit system on Wednesday afternoon, when he noticed a strange looking man seated near him. The man, as it ...

For the past few years, social network mega-sites Facebook and MySpace have been getting a little safer thanks to each making efforts to block sex offenders. Now, much of the rest of the Internet is getting the similar treatment, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announcing that 13 more sites are finally following suit, hooking into the state's database of sex offenders and filtering ...

Yesterday, New York City police identified and arrested a man wanted for public masturbation, thanks to one concerned citizen and her camera phone. According to the New York Daily News, 41-year-old Harlem resident Cileane White was minding her own business as she sat on the Number 3 subway train last Friday. Out of nowhere, from across the aisle, Kevin Bishop, 44, of the Bronx, exposed himself ...

Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed into law this week a bill that bans all registered sex offenders in his state from engaging in online social networking. The bill defines a social networking site as one containing: "profile web pages of the members," "photographs placed on the profile web pages," and "any other personal or personally identifying information." Taking effect in January, the bill ...

You can use an iPhone to locate restaurants, movie theaters, and even medical marijuana distributors. While those apps are helpful, a new application aims to make your neighborhood a safer place. The 'Offender Locator' will show a map of all registered sex offenders living in your neighborhood, according to Tech Crunch. By law, sex offenders must register on a free, public Web site. However, ...

This week, University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center released a new study (PDF) of online child predators, and some of its findings may surprise you. While the report tends to get a bit technical, it has some interesting facts, which we've broken down for you below. First off, even though the study estimates that there were approximately 3,715 arrests of online ...

In Vancouver, Washington, a homeless convicted sex offender has been charged with murder in the tragic slaying of 13-year-old Alycia Nipp. Darrin Sanford, convicted in 1998 of propositioning three youths between the ages of eight and 11, was released from prison last November and outfitted with a GPS monitoring device. After Sanford confessed to Nipp's murder, Clark County authorities used the ...

With so many people on Facebook (175 million by the Web site's own count), common sense tells us that not all of them are nice people. Thankfully, social networking companies are being proactive in their attempts to purge their sites of not-so-nice members (by not-so-nice we mean pedophiles). Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from it site since May 1, 2008, according to Connecticut's ...

From our "well intentioned, but crossing the line" file comes the tale of a law that will go into effect January 1, 2009 in Georgia that requires registered sex offenders to hand over usernames and passwords for any online service they subscribe to. The law is aimed at ensuring that sex offenders do not use the Internet to prey upon children or in other inappropriate ways. Of course, there are ...

We've reported on plenty of tools and services designed to help you locate nearby sex offenders, all designed with the hopes of enabling parents to keep their children safe. Critics of these tools often say that they can make those sex offenders targets of retribution crimes by would-be vigilantes, and that seems to be just what was attempted in a case of arson in Evansville, Indiana. There, a ...

The Internet has, in many ways, made it more difficult for parents to keep their kids safe. Children have access to just about any sort of illicit content you can think of. That said, the Internet has also made it easier to keep track of kids, whether by monitoring what they do online, who they chat with, or -- in this case -- quickly and easily finding the location of sex offenders in your ...